The Nation: Making Book; Handicapping the Race From Page to Screen

By A. O. SCOTT

Published: August 10, 2003

WHENEVER Hollywood releases a movie based on a popular book -- even, for that matter, an obscure one -- at least one wiseguy, usually a critic, is sure to point out what has been lost and added in the translation. Chronology is warped, important details are changed, composite characters are invented, sprawling, ambiguous narratives are shoehorned into the sacrosanct three-act structure -- and each of these departures will give someone cause to cavil.

If that weren't bad enough, another species of smarty-pants can be counted on to register the opposite complaint: that a given movie is too faithful to its source, and misses an opportunity to break free of the limitations of prose and achieve the full power of cinema.

I should confess here that as a movie critic for The New York Times, I have been, when mood and occasion suited, both kinds of wiseguy, scolding ''A Beautiful Mind'' for its omissions and fabrications and penalizing ''Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets'' for its literal-minded devotion to J. K. Rowling's book.

Just recently, Gary Ross's ''Seabiscuit'' made itself vulnerable to both kinds of carping: the film simplified Laura Hillenbrand's sweeping racetrack pageant, but at the same time treated it with too much reverence. It seemed that few critics could resist comparing the texture of the book with the rhythm of the film. As David Denby noted in The New Yorker, Mr. Ross turned ''a celebration of idiosyncrasy'' into ''one of the squarest movies ever made.''

As usual, though, the critics' reservations have been thoroughly ignored. The film adaptation of ''Seabiscuit'' was one of the five highest-grossing movies in its opening weekend, with the best per-screen average. Like ''A Beautiful Mind,'' ''The Hours'' and even the Harry Potter adaptations, the movie of ''Seabiscuit'' has already reached a larger audience than the book ever did, and far more quickly. Moviegoers instinctively grasp what movie critics, it seems, are stubbornly slow to learn: books and movies are different.

Now, they are often different in interesting ways, and thinking about the ways screenwriters and directors approach the challenges of literary adaptation can be helpful in evaluating the success or failure of their movies as movies. How do they grapple with a novelist's sense of psychological nuance, or a historian's dense weave of detail? How do they squeeze 400 leisurely pages into two fast-moving hours? Books and movies both tell stories, but in qualitatively different and perhaps ultimately incomparable ways.

But there is also a quantitative difference, and it is hardly trivial. Random House, Ms. Hillenbrand's publisher, has so far printed more than four million copies, including 500,000 in hardcover. That last figure, by publishing standards, is phenomenal. But if the same number of people who purchased the hardcover edition of ''Seabiscuit'' in the two years since its publication had gone to see the movie in its first two weeks of release, the film would have been a disastrous flop on the order of ''The Adventures of Pluto Nash'' or ''The Bonfire of the Vanities.''

Ms. Hillenbrand's was nonetheless a big enough best seller to cross the boundary between literary success and pop-cultural sensation. The possibility that a large number of her readers would be lining up to buy movie tickets posed a delicate challenge for Mr. Ross and his collaborators, not unlike the one confronted by Chris Columbus, who directed the first two Harry Potter movies.

Forget about the reviewers: how much variation would these passionate readers tolerate? In playing it safe, both Mr. Ross and Mr. Columbus put together movies that were, paradoxically, at once satisfying and disappointing: satisfying because they hew so carefully to their sources, disappointing because they seem to have no real life of their own.

In any case, movies and books compete with each other only on a high plane of abstraction. There may still be people who believe that film adaptations threaten to supplant their sources, but there is not much evidence to support this worry. On the contrary: since ''Seabiscuit'' the movie was released, sales of ''Seabiscuit'' the book have accelerated.

Given a choice between books and movies, a lot of people -- critics included -- are happy to choose both.

Photos: The legendary 1938 race between Seabiscuit and War Admiral (top) was a captured in ''Seabiscuit.'' (Photos by Associated Press/Universal Pictures)